ifda dossier 74 - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

ciliation between the geographical unity and the social unity: it is now
possible not only to dream of a genuine human wholeness, but to
realise it. If they are objective and subjective reasons for the new
awareness of the military and ecological threats to survival, there are
both ethical and militant reasons for the upsurge of, and solidarity with,
those dispossessed by the juggernaut of modernity. This species of ours
not only created tools. It has also created values, and human groupings.
Capitalism might have increased man's dominion over nature (even to
the point of trespassing the limits) and separated human being from
human being; communism might have failed to provide a viable
alternative; social-democracy might be failing to ensure "the necessary
correctives: the problem is still with us. The planet cannot go on with
nuclear weapons and ruining the biosphere, and the species cannot go
on in rejecting part of itself. As the 1975 Dag Hammarskdd Report,
Winr Now - Another Development already put it, "society cannot
amputate a part of itself without injury. It is its fabric, the network of
the exchange, which is torn apart and those who remain cannot suffer
the effects". Obsidional fever is nothing new, and those who assume that
they tire protected by their superior wealth, techniques, weaponry and
the like are bound to face the consequences of their shortsightedness.
The new actors
The enforcement of the division among human beings is based on an
institutional division. Prince and Merchant established their power
(governmental or economic) upon the 'rest' of society, which, with
episodic exceptions, resigned it self to the status quo, or, when it did
not, achieved only a change in power holders, never a sustained
humanisation of society. What is perhaps new is that the civil society,
or at least the Citizen (people's associations) which express it, is
increasingly seeing that improvement will not follow from appointing or
accepting new lords, even 'good' or better lords, but from the admission
of the necessary, but partial and specialised, role of both Prince and
Merchant, and from its own concomitant autonomous empowerment.
This requires first of all circumscribing the power of Prince and